God Bless Ian Murdock

My oldest son John, who works at Facebook, just asked me if I knew Ian Murdock.  I told John that I knew Ian from his days at Sun Microsystems when he was hired to come in to help guide the open Solaris movement.  He created the Debian Linux operating system that was named after his wife Debra and himself.  I was very saddened to hear of Ian's passing as he was only 42.  

As Ian stated at his blog:

"I worked at Sun Microsystems, where I led Project Indiana, the effort designed to lower barriers to adoption of the Solaris operating system that led to the OpenSolaris distribution. OpenSolaris, in turn, led to Solaris 11. (Alas, Oracle discontinued OpenSolaris itself in late 2010.) Later, I ran the developer program and worked on cloud computing."

Ian was brilliant and one of the nicest guys you would ever meet.  This is a big loss for all who knew Ian and for the Linux community.